From the U.K. “New Statesman”: “World cereal stocks are at an all-time low, food-aid programmes have run out of money and millions face starvation. Yet wealthy countries persist with plans to use grain for petrol. The U.K.’s Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation introduced on 15 April, mandates petrol retailers to mix 2.5 per cent biofuels into fuel sold to motorists. This will rise to 5.75 per cent by 2010.”

The concern is legitimate as biofuel from corn has proven to be very inefficient. The end cost is actually higher per gallon than gasoline.

Using our farmland to make ethanol instead of food is only a small part of the problem. There are other threats, such as wheat rust. A strain named Ug99 emerged in Africa in 1999. Despite containment efforts, winds carried spores to the bread baskets of the Middle East. It is now poised to infect prime wheat growing regions in Europe, Ukraine, Russia, India and Pakistan.

Should even one major wheat producer have a crop failure, the effect on the world’s ability to feed itself would be immense, which explains why crash programs to develop new rust resistant strains are now underway.

However, if Ug99 spreads swiftly, devastating crops before science can breed resistant strains, already grave food security problems will expand. So this isn’t simply a distant problem for poor nations, it looms over rich ones like Canada and the United States, too.

World Bank president Robert Zoellick has bluntly warned the world’s richest countries that a potential planetary catastrophe is unfolding with frightening speed. Jacques Diouf, head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, warns that with 37 countries are already in crisis and each day brings greater risk of global famine. India’s finance minister was more direct. “It is becoming starker by the day,” Palaniappan Chidambaram said. “Unless we act fast for a global consensus on the price spiral, the social unrest induced by food prices in several countries will conflagrate into a global contagion, leaving no country — developed or otherwise — unscathed.”

The consequences for the world’s poor are brutal: we drive, they starve. The mass diversion of grain harvests into ethanol plants for fuel is reaching its political and moral limits.

The UN says it takes 232 kilograms of corn to fill a 50-litre (about 13 gallons) car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted “massacres” unless the biofuel policy is halted.

Biofuels is one cause, but just one. The reason for food “shortages” is speculation in commodity futures following the collapse of the credit markets. Needing quick returns to offset the huge loan losses, dealers are taking trillions of dollars out of equities and mortgage bonds and ploughing them into food and raw materials. It’s called the “commodities super-cycle” on Wall Street, and it is likely to cause starvation on an epic scale because this competition is massively driving up prices.

The rocketing price of wheat, soybeans, sugar, coffee - you name it - is a direct result of debt defaults that have caused financial panic in the west and encouraged investors to seek “stores of value”. These range from gold and oil at one end to corn, cocoa and cattle at the other; speculators are even placing bets on water prices.

This is a bubble to end all bubbles and one that can only burst with the deaths of millions of people through starvation. The price of oil is not going to come down because the Arabs and Russians and Venezuelans, etcetera, are glorying in the huge rush of wealth. Oil drives food production. Commodities speculation and investment drive up prices right along with oil increases, which show no sign of stopping.

Profit-taking may doom the 2.8 billion people who live on less than $2 a day, almost half the world’s population, to pay for these profits with their lives, and long before then there will be wars.

When mass starvation sets in, which it will, disease controls and any efforts at sanitation will fall apart and plagues will roam the planet like they’ve always done in times like these.

The rise of Islam is going to have to take a back seat to global starvation. I don’t think all those super-rich sheiks in Dubai are going to open their purses to feed the starving masses of muslims, nor the Saudis, either, as their dreams of a new global Caliphate come crashing down when hundreds of millions of muslims begin starving to death.

They will, because the truth is that the countries that have been taken over by Islam are the most backward, worst managed and poorest in all the world, except for those that have oil reserves, and those people will be the first to starve. In Darfur, for example, it is muslims who are killing off all the Christians in order to Islamize the country, and in the process they are killing all the farmers who’ve been providing them with food. Those who still survive are without work or income and surviving in camps off what little charity they can get.

In the sprawling slum of Haiti’s Cité Soleil, Placide Simone, 29, offered one of her five offspring to a stranger. “Take one,” she said, cradling a listless baby and motioning toward four rail-thin toddlers, none of whom had eaten that day. “You pick. Just feed them.”

Mother Nature always seeks a balance, and she always finds it. Most people in the “Have” nations will survive. In fact, they’ll hardly notice all the starvation while most of those in the “Have Not” nations die. Between the grain shortage, rising oil prices, increasing inflation and wars and pending wars, we are hurtling over the brink.

About 20,000 workers rioted over high food prices and low wages on Saturday close to the Bangladesh capital Dhaka, police said, amid spreading global unrest over soaring grocery costs.

Food riots seem to be happening around the world on a near-daily basis lately. U.N. peacekeepers fired rubber bullets and tear gas at an angry mob that tried to storm the National Palace in the Hatian capital, Port-au-Prince today. Riots began in Haiti last Wednesday and five people have already been killed in the violence.

Food Riots in Egypt

The UN secretary general has warned that millions of people are at risk of starvation as global food stocks have fallen to their lowest levels for decades. The most acute effects have been seen in Egypt, where thousands of people have resorted to violence due to the unavailability of basic food products such as bread, rice, sugar and cooking oil, and rising food prices. At least 10 people have died over the past two weeks, in riots that erupted at government subsidised bakeries.

Besides Haiti and Egypt, there’s been food riots in 8 African nations, mostly along the western coast, as well as in Mexico, Milan, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Yemen, and the food shortage is just beginning. The poorer nations suffer starvation first and so the riots also start there first, but the food shortage is steadily becoming more widespread.

I’ve posted on this before and I’ll be posting on it again before it’s all done. The world is heading into global famine, and with famine comes war, disease and death. Those of you who live in affluent countries, thank your lucky stars but keep your powder dry, because if this situation isn’t reversed soon, global famine alone is enough to spark a global war. Starvation and plagues go together. Always have and this time will be no different.

Now is a good time to kill off those mice and rats that you’ve been putting off doing. Fleas…..

The chief of U.N. humanitarian operations, John Holmes, said Tuesday that poor people around the world are facing worsening hardship because of the expense of food. He said food prices had risen an average of 40 percent over the last year.

“The security implications should also not be underestimated as food riots are already being reported across the globe,” Holmes said during a conference in Dubai. “Compounding the challenges of climate change in what some have labeled the perfect storm are the recent dramatic trends in soaring food and fuel prices.”

MAHALLA EL-KOBRA, Egypt (AP) — “Egypt rushed Tuesday to grant bonuses to workers after two days of deadly riots over high food prices and low wages wracked this northern industrial city, fueling government fears that economic angst might boil over across the country. Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif hurried to Mahalla al-Kobra on Tuesday with several top economic ministers to meet with workers at the 50-year-old, state-owned Misr Spinning and Weaving factory complex that employs 25,000 people and announced they would receive a bonus of 30 days’ pay and promised to address their demands for better health care and higher wages.

30 days pay is $34. The average Egyptian worker is desperately poor and is the head of a family of 5. Food prices have risen 40% in Egypt and world-wide over the past year. You can’t afford tires on a bicycle on $34 a month.

A top United Nations official warned that many poor nations are in danger of such unrest as inflation heats up around the globe.

Unrest? You mean food riots that sweep away entire governments? Open warfare between government soldiers and police, and the population at large? Widespread famine, and the raging disease epidemics that go with it? The return of Bubonic Plague to Africa, plus Cholera and Dysentery and God knows what other filth-borne, insect-borne, rat-carried diseases?

I’d posted on this looming future sometime ago, maybe a year or more, I forget now. It was easy to see it coming then and now everybody gets it.

This isn’t entirely due to population increases or changing global weather conditions. In fact their contribution is small and not very significant. The shortage of food is due mostly to its rising cost combined with the switch of millions of farm acres to methanol production, and hoarding.

The huge increase in oil from $20 a barrel to $108 currently drives up food production costs. Much of the fertilizer is a byproduct of petroleum. The farm machines run on it, the food is harvested and transported and packaged and preserved using petroleum products.

Food producers, rice, wheat, corn and soy, are hoarding these products against higher prices as the market futures spiral up, thus creating an additional shortage.

This level of greed is foolish and these people are going to lose it all when the starving population rips open their doors and carries off the bags of grain, leaving a lot of dead bodies behind who will never run this business again. That means no more food distribution at all, which means a rapid increase in mass starvation and no nation will step in to help.

Why not? Because there will simply be too much of it going on to cope with. The price of oil needs to come down to no more than $50 a barrel immediately. Fat chance in Hell. The corn/methanol farmers need to switch back to food corn. A lot of them are, in fact, doing this and others are switching over to soy beans, an excellent food source, and the hoarders need to open up their warehouses and start selling their stock at fair prices. Unlikely but who knows, after the first few warehouse raids, perhaps the rest will wake up.

Otherwise, those hoofbeats are going to get awful loud. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. War, Famine, Plague and Death are on the road now and now, anyone can see it.